ABSTRACT
The last several chapters have been concerned with the sorts of mental representations that are formed from social information. These representations are of limited interest, however, without an accompanying understanding of how they are used to arrive at judgments and behavioral decisions. This task is theoretically performed by the Inference Maker (see Figure 2.1), based on rules that, although typically acquired through social learning, have become hard-wired into the unit’s library. These rules depend on the type of judgment to be made and the type of knowledge available. They may also depend on the information-processing demands that are placed on the judge or decision-maker. One must, therefore, not only be able to circumscribe the alternative rules that may potentially be used to make a particular type of inference. In addition, one must be able to specify the conditions in which each of these rules is likely to be applied.
